The effect of schwa deletion on word recognition in continuous speech.

Schwa (mute e) deletion is a very frequent phonological process in spoken French. In the first part of the paper, we show that in two-word strings made up of a determiner and a noun, the recognition of the noun is delayed when the schwa in its first syllable is deleted. Both a lexical decision task and a word repetition task show a schwa deletion effect. Then, by means of a slowed reading task, we study the direction of attachment of the initial consonant of the noun when produced with schwa deletion. Results show that there are two classes of consonants : those that prefer one type of attachment (either left attachment with the preceding determiner or right attachment with the noun's second syllable) and those that accept both types of attachment. Based on these results, we test whether attachment direction land hence the resyllabification that takes place) has an additional impact on word recognition. We replicate the schwa deletion, effect but Sind no difference between the two types of attachment.Finally, we show that one model of spoken word recognition (TRACE) accounts for the findings better than another (Cohort) and we discuss future directions for this line of research.